The International Energy Agency’s new World Energy Outlook puts energy at the centre of economic and national security. The picture that emerges is twofold: on the one hand, oil and gas supply in the short term is ample, with a wave of new LNG projects poised to ease tensions; on the other hand, risks are multiplying, as vulnerabilities now affect the entire system, from power grids to critical mineral chains. Against this backdrop, the recipe is clear: diversify sources and suppliers and cooperate more amongst countries to withstand the brunt of geopolitical shocks, price volatility, and increasingly frequent climate impacts.
The IEA points out that demand for energy services will continue to grow for mobility, heating and cooling, domestic and industrial uses, but especially for data centres and artificial intelligence. This is where we see the discontinuity: we have entered the “Age of Electricity”: in all the WEO 2025 scenarios, electricity runs faster than overall energy consumption. In 2025, global investment in data centres is estimated at $580 billion, a figure that exceeds the $540 billion earmarked for oil supply—a clear sign of how economic priorities are changing and the infrastructure needed to support them. But the grid is not ready: investment in electric generation has increased by nearly 70 per cent since 2015, while investment in grids is advancing at a much slower pace (less than half). Closing this gap, increasing energy storage capacity and making the system more flexible are the new priorities.
Emerging economies
The baton of energy consumption growth will gradually pass from China to a group of emerging economies led by India and Southeast Asia, joined by the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. None will replicate China’s energy-intensive rise of the last 15 years, but the new geography of demand will shift market balances and, more importantly, require a different infrastructure map, with 80 per cent of consumption growth to 2035 expected in areas with high solar irradiance. And in fact, renewables remain the fastest growing technologies in every scenario, driven by photovoltaics.
The weakness of the new system lies in the materials supply chains. One country dominates the refining of 19 strategic minerals—essential for grids, batteries, electric vehicles and a long list of strategic technologies—out of 20 with an average share of around 70 per cent: meaning that a commercial or political hiccup can reverberate through a chain of events on electrification, digital and defence. The IEA warns that reversing this concentration will be a slow process if policies aimed at diversifying supplies and accelerating new projects throughout the value chain do not intervene.
We are falling behind on climate goals
The WEO 2025 reiterates that its scenarios are not predictions: they are used to assess how different choices about policies, investments, and technologies produce important impacts on security, affordability, and emissions. Inside this range is an uncomfortable constant: we are lagging on both universal energy access and climate goals. Today, 730 million people still lack electricity and nearly 2 billion cook using methods that are harmful to health. The IEA presents a country-by-country trajectory leading to universal electric access by 2035 and clean cooking by 2040, with LPG playing a major role in the transition. On climate, all the trajectories exceed 1.5°C in the immediate term, but in the neutrality scenario to 2050 the temperature may return below that threshold in the long term: which does not absolve anyone, but indicates that the space for positive action is not closed.
Finally, resilience. Energy infrastructure outages affected more than 200 million households worldwide in 2023, with transmission and distribution lines responsible for 85 per cent of the problems. If the Electricity Age is already here, the priority becomes securing the backbones that hold it up, accelerating permitting procedures, response capabilities and cyber-protection standards. This is the ground on which international cooperation and diversification are not slogans, but collective insurance against the systemic risk that power shortages—now more than ever—represent.
